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Cloud over India's rice crop growth

India's harvest stunted by pollution, researchers find

Washington: In findings that may have a significant resonance for India's agricultural economy, U.S. researchers have reported that pollution has stifled growth in the country's rice harvest, cheating the staple crop of the rain and cool night-time temperatures that it needs in order to flourish.

Since the mid-1980s, the stubborn brown cloud of pollution that shrouds much of India, coupled with increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, together have limited both the yields and extent of rice farms in the nine States that account for most of the country's wet-season harvest, University of California researchers report in a study.

Had both forms of pollution been cut, India's rice harvest across those States would have increased more than 14 per cent between 1985 and 1998, they report. That could have helped restore the rate of growth to that seen in the 1960s and 1970s, in the immediate wake of the Green Revolution that allowed India to become self-sufficient in rice production.

The researchers pin at least part of the blame on two pollution-linked phenomena, though they acknowledge they only augment other explanations for the stagnating growth in rice output. Those include a fall in prices, soil exhaustion and deteriorating irrigation infrastructure.

"We are no way arguing atmospheric brown clouds and greenhouse gases are the only reason for this slowdown, but it's an explanation not suggested previously and contributes to the slowdown," said study co-author Jeffrey Vincent, environmental research director at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

The details have appeared in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. — AP

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